Learn How You Can Grow Your Blog to Get More Traffic

Setting up a blog is an easy task and takes no more than ten minutes. Keeping that blog up and running takes a little more time and effort. But making sure your blog grows in popularity each day requires some extra work. Luckily, that work is something you don’t need to bust your brains to do. There are some very simple yet important things that can skyrocket your blog’s popularity. In a rare turn of events, this proposition is indeed as good as it sounds. Try out the tips that follow, and you’ll see the results yourself.

How to Grow Your Blog

A newly created blog is like a new relationship. There’s that honeymoon period where you are full of optimism, full of the desire to excel, and can’t stop dreaming about success. However, it doesn’t take long to realise that things are not going as you planned. You might get demotivated by the lack of traffic on your blog. While this doesn’t mean that your content isn’t good, you soon start believing that. To stop that from happening, and ensuring your relationship with the blog turns into a successful marriage, learn a few tricks of the trade.

Pick the Right Web Host

One of the most important things you can do starting out is to start right. That means picking a good web host. When you launch your site, you need to have your own domain and use another server to host your site. Depending on which provider you use, you could get mixed results. Check out this pricing table to help you find the perfect web host for getting your blog the most traffic and best page load times so your traffic stays on your page instead of leaving.

Keep a mailing list

Most bloggers mistakenly think that a mailing list is something to have once the blog becomes popular. This is a fatal mistake. You need to have a mailing list from the very first day. A mailing list is the option to subscribe to a blog’s newsletter via email. When a user provides his or her email in that box, they will receive email notifications whenever you make a blog post.

How does it help?

This is important to maintain a steady flow of traffic. It also helps you get more traffic and followers, for your email subscribers can spread the word to others. There are many free services for having a mailing list for your blog, like Hello Bar or Constant Contact.

How to get it right?

There are some things you need to keep in mind when you setup a mailing list. For example, make sure that the subscription option is something the user cannot miss out on seeing when they visit your blog. Another good idea is to offer bonus content to email subscribers. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy or something that costs you money. Just offer some bonus content or other services to make the user subscribe to the mailing list. You can do A/B tests to see what kind of theme and design of the mailing list works best for your blog to get the most out of it.

Follow a Plan

When it comes to blogging, your goal shouldn’t just be to write, write, and write. Loads of content on a variety of topics is one way of running a blog. But if you expect that something out of a variety of topics will interest someone, then it’s a bit of waste. You’ll waste your time and energy, for you spend both in creating your posts. Try and create a web of content that is intermixed and where each post complements others.

What should your Strategy be?

There are a few basic pointers you can focus on when devising a plan for your blog. First of all, make sure you focus on the visitors. By this, we mean that you should know what you want the visitors to do before they leave your blog. It could be anything, from leaving a comment, subscribing to your mailing list, clicking on an advert, or purchasing a product. Then, of course, you need a plan to market your blog.

Pay Attention to Your Visitors

When you run a blog properly, you have a good number of followers. But even if that’s not the case, one way of achieving that is to interact with your visitors. Whenever someone leaves a comment on your blog, make sure that you respond to them. Also, encourage your visitors to ask you questions regarding the content you write. You should try and help your visitors as much as possible. That’s the best way you can ensure the growth of your blog.

Make it Appealing for Google

It’s common knowledge that the popularity of your blog depends heavily on how Google rates it. The higher your Google ranking is, the higher your blog will appear when a user enters a keyword that matches a post of your blog. Users hardly have the patience to scroll down page after page to get a solution to their problem, unless it’s a particularly unique problem. So a better Google rank goes a long way in growing your blog.

How to Make it attractive for Google?

There are some pointers you can focus on so that Google rates your blog high.

Never plagiarise or choose topics from other blogs and twist it a little to give it the look of an original post. The people at Google hate that more than anything. The content of your post should be original. It should be original, and it should ideally help the user in some way or the other. The best way to ensure higher Google ranking is to have content that solves people’s problems. Google sees that as helpful for users, so it means a better ranking for your blog.

Focus on the formatting of your content. A mix of text, infographics, images, videos, and links can make your blog post attractive. But make sure you don’t overdo it. Otherwise it will all look too cluttered and your strategy could easily backfire.

Ensure that your blog doesn’t take too much time to load. This is another major factor in deciding your Google ranking.

You can also use Yoast SEO plugin. It’s a really useful plugin that gives you a green light whenever you are doing something right on your blog. It helps you know the Do’s and Don’ts.

Post Frequently and Make Them Detailed

When you want to make sure that your blog is popular, you need to post as often as you can. Posting just once a week isn’t good enough, especially when you are in the growing stages. Writing frequently keeps you in the sight of your frequent visitors. Like it’s said, out of sight, out of mind. You can’t afford to be out of the mind of your followers early in your blog’s life. Another benefit of posting frequently is that your chances of getting a higher Google ranking improves. Each post is ranked separately. So the more you post, the better your chances.

Also, make sure that the content you write is detailed. It should be long, and detailed. Why? Because that makes it more likely that you’ll get a hit for long-tail keywords. Any blog owner knows that getting a hit for keywords leads to more people visiting their blog. Shorter keywords can find a match on many blogs, but the chances of a long-tail keyword striking a match on that same number of blogs are very small. That means that if you focus on those keywords, then your chances of getting more visitors improve by leads and bounds.

Network

If you want to grow your blog, you need the help of others. What better people to ask for help than fellow bloggers? Not that you’re asking them for help for promoting. You should know how to get that done.

Share other blogs’ content

You probably have your own niche when it comes to the content of your blogs. But that niche isn’t unique. So, it’s important you find other bloggers that share your niche. More importantly, you should try and share their content. This can be done on social media. Share one of their posts and maybe comment your views on that post.

This brings you in the notice of those other bloggers. If you want to ensure that they take notice, you can always tweet to let them know that you’ve shared their content and given your opinion on it.

Provide Links to Other Blogs

This is just as important as the previous point. You can always expect to grow your blog when you link it to other blogs. This is because it provides traffic for the blog you’ve linked your post too. So that makes the other blogger know that you’re helping him. But more than that, it makes your post appear well-researched.

Interact with Other Bloggers

Seeking the help of other bloggers is important. It’s mentioned above that you can share the content of their blogs or link your posts to them. Another way of doing this is to comment on their posts. Writing insightful and helpful comments that deal with that particular post brings you in the notice. You become visible not only to the blogger but to others who read and comment in that space as well. In the end, it will really help you attract more visitors.

Use the Right Theme

All blogs have a theme and appearance. But the popular ones have an appearance that ensures maximum followers. Follow these tips to get it right:

Font

The most important thing about your post is that it should be readable. This doesn’t only mean that the content is good, but more importantly, it’s the font you use. The font size should be large enough so that the reader doesn’t have to strain his or her eyes to read it. A minimum font size of 16px is recommended for good readability of the post.

Mobile Readability

This is quite important for the modern day blogger. Since it is estimated that roughly 50% of your traffic comes from mobile visitors, you need to ensure that your blog appears attractive and smooth on mobile phones. A simple way to find out your blog’s mobile quality is to use the Google mobile test.

Prevent Cluttering

This has been mentioned before, but it’s important, so another mention is required. While there are many things you can do to improve the readability and appearance of your post, don’t overdo things. It takes only a little bit of carelessness and extra-fancifulness to make things bad for your blog. Too much of videos, images, links, etc. breaks readability and bothers the user greatly.

The best things about all of these things is that they are simple to adopt and free to adopt. Of course, you can pay a small amount of money for advertising and maybe getting some visitors for your blog. A sum of $50 per month can improve your blog considerably. Refraining from paying isn’t always right, because blogging is a business, after all. But if you put in the effort and follow simple tricks of the trade, you won’t have to spend a penny.

Ali is a freelance journalist with 5 years of experience in web journalism and marketing. He contributes to various online publications like Best10VPN. With a master degree, now he combines his passions for writing about internet security and technology. When he is not working, he loves traveling and playing games.